University of Missouri, St. Louis IRL @ UMSL Theses Graduate Works 4-22-2011 HISTORY OF THE OBSERVATORY AS AN INSTITUTION: FROM MARAGHA TO MOUNT WILSON Rihab Sawah University of Missouri-St. Louis, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://irl.umsl.edu/thesis Recommended Citation Sawah, Rihab, "HISTORY OF THE OBSERVATORY AS AN INSTITUTION: FROM MARAGHA TO MOUNT WILSON" (2011). Theses. 170. http://irl.umsl.edu/thesis/170 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Works at IRL @ UMSL. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses by an authorized administrator of IRL @ UMSL. For more information, please contact [email protected]. HISTORY OF THE OBSERVATORY AS AN INSTITUTION: FROM MARAGHA TO MOUNT WILSON Rihab Sawah M.S., Physics, University of Missouri – Columbia, 1999 B.S., Mathematics, University of Missouri – Columbia, 1993 B.S. Mechanical Engineering, University of Missouri – Columbia, 1993 A Thesis Submitted to The Graduate School at the University of Missouri – St. Louis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in History May 2011 Advisory Committee Kevin Fernlund, Ph.D. Chairperson John Gillingham III, Ph.D. Minsoo Kang, Ph.D. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis advisor, Dr. Kevin Fernlund, for his support and feedback throughout this project. His insights and experience as an historian have been most valuable and indispensable. I am very thankful to many others at the history and philosophy departments at the University of Missouri – St. Louis for their time and energy. I am especially thankful to Dr. Jack Gillingham III, who helped plant the first seeds of this thesis, and Dr. Minsoo Kang, who provided creative ideas to assist in improving my work. I am also thankful to them for serving on my thesis committee. I would like to thank my mentor, Dr. George Saliba, at Columbia University, for his continued, unwavering support, and for serving as an inspirational role model. In addition, I want to thank Dr. A. Mark Smith, at the University of Missouri – Columbia, for providing a rigorous (and fun) training in the history of science, and for challenging me to break out of the mold of my scientific academic training. For their love, encouragement, and unconditional support, I would like to thank my parents, Mamoun Sawah and Widad Fakir, my sister Khaula Sawah, my Great Aunt Fatma Katbi, and my favorite mathematics teacher and friend, Yehya Al-Sayyed. I want to give special thanks to my husband, Anthony S. Clark, for his love and support. I am mostly thankful to him for constantly challenging me so that I would continue to grow personally, and professionally. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my Creator for all the insights, the energy, the abundance, the wonderful opportunities, and for the absolute and unconditional love and support that are always present, especially through those challenging times. ii ABSTRACT The astronomical observatory has existed since ancient times and has served a number of public causes—religious, astrological, practical, and, more recently, scientific. In this thesis, I show how the observatory underwent three major transitions, beginning with its ―institutionalization‖ in the thirteenth century, with the founding of the Maragha Observatory. I discuss how the Maragha observatory (located in the northwestern part of Persia) became a model for future observatories, including the Mount Wilson Observatory. The Maragha Observatory produced a revolutionary school of thought known as the ―Maragha School.‖ This school marked a sharp departure from Ptolemaic Greek astronomy. I argue that Copernicus should be seen as belonging to this school as its last and most known follower. The observatory went through a second transition with the introduction of the telescope. The telescope opened new channels of inquiry. Galileo‘s observations of our moon's surface, sunspots, the moons of Jupiter, and the phases of Venus, started a race to improve the telescope in order to obtain ever higher resolution images. The third transition occurred when astronomers became concerned with questions having little or no practical use. This era, which began in the nineteenth century and extends into our own time, was defined by the quest for pure knowledge. It occurred as a result of major improvements in instrumentation and with development of spectroscopy, which gave birth to the field of astrophysics. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE ACKNWLEDGEMENTS ii ABSTRACT iii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS v I. INTRODUCTION 1 II. EARLY HISTORY OF OBSERVATIONAL ASTRONOMY 9 1. Astronomy in Antiquity 9 2. Greek Astronomy 12 3. Early Islamic Observational Posts and Observatories 13 III. TRANSITION ONE: MARAGHA OBSERVATORY: EARLIEST MODEL OF THE MODERN OBSERVATORY 16 1. Maragha Observatory: Birth of a Modern Observatory 16 a. The Maragha Revolution 22 b. Tusi's Breakthrough and Legacy 23 c. Transmission of the Maragha Model Westward 28 2. Later Islamic Observatories 32 a. Samarqand Observatory 32 b. Istanbul Observatory 32 3. Early European Observatories 34 a. Kassel Observatory 34 b. Tycho Brahe's Observatories 34 IV. TRANSITION TWO: INTRODUCTION OF THE TELESCOPE TO THE OBSERVATORY 36 1. Seventeenth Century European Observatories 36 2. The Royal Observatory at Greenwich 39 3. Early Observatories in the United States 44 V. TRANSITION THREE: ASTRONOMY RESEARCH AS A SCIENCE FOR THE SAKE OF SCIENCE 46 1. Probing the Heavens with a Spectroscope 46 2. Lick Observatory 49 3. The Legendary Mount Wilson Observatory 52 a. George Ellery Hale and the Coming of Mount Wilson Observatory 52 b. Edwin Hubble and the Birth of Observational Cosmology 58 c. Hubble's Expanding Universe 64 VI. CONCLUSION 67 iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Figure 1: Diagram of Tusi's Couple as depicted in the thirteenth century Arabic MS 319 (folio 28v) held at the Vatican library. 75 Figure 2: Map of the famous Observatories of the Islamic world. 76 Figure 3: Illustration of the mural quadrant al-Urdi constructed at the Maragha Observatory. 77 Figure 4: Model of the armillary sphere from the Maragha Observatory. 78 Figure 5: Model of the celestial sphere from the Maragha Observatory. 79 Figure 6: Statement of the Tusi Couple as stated by Naṣir al-Din al-Tusi (translated by F.Jamil. Ragep). 80 Figure 7: A general representation of the four cases of Urdi‘s Lemma. 81 Figure 8: The Royal Observatory in Greenwich in Flamsteed‘s time. 82 Figure 9: The Airy Transit Circle. 83 Figure 10: The 15-inch Harvard equatorial. 84 Figure 11: Early Spectroscope. 85 Figure 12: William Huggins‘ 8-inch Clark-Cooke equatorial refractor. 86 Figure 13: The 36-inch Lick refractor. 87 Figure 14: A sketch of Spiral galaxy M51 and its companion galaxy NGC 5195. 88 Figure 15: The 40-inch Yerkes telescope with nebular spectrograph. 89 Figure 16: The 60-inch Mount Wilson telescope. 90 Figure 17: The 100-inch Mount Wilson telescope. 91 Figure 18: Photographic images of solar vortices around a bipolar sunspot and unipolar spots. 92 Figure 19: Hale's showing his compilation of sunspots polarity data. 93 v Figure 20: Hubble's galaxy classification scheme (Hubble's Tuning Fork) 94 Figure 21: Photographic images of elliptical and irregular nebulae. 95 Figure 22: Photographic images of spiral and barred spiral nebulae. 96 Figure 23: The period-luminosity relation graph. 97 Figure 24: Spectroscopic images of elliptical galaxies and their corresponding Doppler shifts. 98 Figure 25: Hubble‘s formulation of the velocity-distance relation. 99 vi I. INTRODUCTION This thesis will chart how the observatory changed over time, from the thirteenth century through the twentieth century, from Maragha to Mount Wilson, from Persia to Pasadena, and from Arabs to Americans. First, some background. The astronomical observatory is an old institution. It began in many forms that reflected an attempt to study the observed objects in the heavens. The observatory gradually went through a transition into an observational post, and eventually matured into a permanent facility with the sole purpose of observing the sky. For the longest time, such astronomical observational centers were associated with astrology, often of interest to local rulers. Gradually, observatories divorced themselves from astrology to emerge finally as pure scientific research centers. For our purposes, an institution refers to a long-established practice that is devoted for a particular public cause. The most ancient form of science, which has maintained continuity throughout recorded human history, is observing the sky. Before the Medieval era, the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, African and South American tribes, north western European cultures, ancient Chinese, Indians, and Greeks all observed the heavens. The common thread among all civilizations is a keen interest in the motion of heavenly objects. Such interest in the heavens was often religious in purpose; farming was also important given the need to predict the seasons for planting and harvesting. The earliest written astronomical records date back to the Ancient Egyptians and the Babylonians in the third, second, and first millennia BC. The Egyptians, who 1 worshiped the sun god Ra, followed a solar calendar. This solar calendar year was divided into twelve months, and each month into thirty days making the year equal to 360 days in length, plus an additional special five-day unit. Each day was further divided into twelve daytime segments and twelve nighttime segments. Hence our solar calendar today has its roots in the Egyptian calendar and our hour is also of Egyptian origin.1 Babylonian astronomy was very sophisticated; the Babylonians recorded a catalogue of stars and constellations. They developed tables that predicted the lunar year changes over a period of 210 years. They used the sexagesimal number system that was based on the number sixty; hence the subdivision of an hour and an angle into sixty minutes and each minute into sixty seconds is Babylonian in origin.